13.9.06

Waskawy Wabbit Wasted.

I got an email from Rob of fuquad!, asking quite simply "I gotta know. Did the rabbit die or what?"

Like an idiot, I spent fifteen minutes going back over a month's worth of blog entries for any reference to a dead rabbit. No dice. Finally, I had to admit my ignorance and replied,"Dude, what f*cking rabbit?"

He clarified, thankfully, that he was referring to the pregnancy test Mrs. (not) Prego took last month. I had to admit that I had never heard that expression. Or have I?

From Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion":Pulled into town in a police car Your daddy said I took you just a little too far.Tellin' other things, but your girlfriend lied Can't catch me cause the rabbit done died.

I must have heard that song a thousand and a half times and never thought to figure out what the hell Spit-Lips Tyler was bellowing about. It seems that back in the day they figured out that if you inject a rabbit with broad piss, "it dies if the woman's pregnant." Actually a more scientific explanation is that the human chorionic gonadotropin hormone (present in pregnant broad piss) causes 'changes' in the ovaries of a female rabbit. They had to kill the rabbits anyway to see the results.

It's still the hCG hormone that is used to determine results in modern pregnancy tests. Rabbits have since been spared, thank god. I can only imagine the look in a rabbit's eye as some quack comes at it with a syringe-full of Mrs. P's house-fraü whizz. "Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...!"

Now let's see what happens when we inject a tapir with the contents of a hemorrhoidal man's enema bag?

I thought this was fantastic. So fantastic that I wanted to read it to BF. As soon as I start reading it, he says "people used to use rabbits for pregnancy tests". So he goes on to explain that it was in an episode of MASH where a nurse wanted one of Radar's rabbits. And here I am thinking that I was going to give him some trivia.

I seem to recall learning this bit of trivia from TV as well, though not MASH (which is chock full of juicy tidbits), but probably from some Woody Allen movie played on TV, back when the cable chanels and censors did't ruin everything and drive programming into the "Reality" toilet that we have today. Anyway, I tried the tapir experiment this afternoon. Thank god the thing only died...